UI to honor Lou Henson

Published 10:56 pm, Monday, August 24, 2015

Lou Henson won a lot of basketball games, his 779 total placing him 10th on the major college list headed by Mike Krzyzewski and Bob Knight.

But this isn’t about what Henson did on the sideline. It’s about who he is. His character.

Two decades and 423 UI wins are dwarfed by the two decades since. And that’s why his signatures and replicas of his orange blazer will be permanently placed on both ends of Henson Court at the State Farm Center.

A formal ceremony will be held Dec. 2 prior to the home opener with Notre Dame.

Good people deserve their rewards, and this was feel-good Monday. Through good days and bad, through successes and failures, Henson and wife Mary set the gold standard for inner strength, humility and decency.

Here’s a typical week for these two. After Henson spent the previous weekend in the hospital, Henson returned to swim and play bridge as usual, bought several lunches for friends, had his blood checked every other day in case his weakened immunity system might be stressed, and received a day-long visit Tuesday from Northwestern athletic director Jim Phillips (a solo drive on a rainy day from Evanston).

Phillips texted later: “I’m not the person I am today without coach.”

Tip your cap

Tip your cap to Mike Thomas. The Illini needed some good news, and this decision to bypass a possible naming-rights donor — Virginia Tech just got $5 million for a 10-year court designation — changed the summer’s negative discussions to something delightfully positive.

“Financially, we can balance it out in other ways,” said Thomas. “We’ve known since the beginning of the construction process several years ago that this would be done. It’s great to pay tribune to a man so engaged in his community. If he ran for mayor, he’d win in a landslide.”

But let’s be honest. Henson wasn’t always beloved. Imagine the social media uproar today if a coach went 37-53 in his first five Big Ten seasons. That was Henson’s conference record through 1980. Nor did his 21-year term end well, the UI’s last five conference records standing at 45-45 … before he gracefully stepped down at the urging of athletic director Ron Guenther.

In between, in a run constructed essentially around in-state talent, the ’80s belonged to the Illini.

Henson and Missouri’s Norm Stewart put the Braggin’ Rights game under a national spotlight, with Henson winning eight straight during one stretch.

His Big Ten record from 1981 through 1991 was 132-66, and the Flying Illini in 1989 captured the imagination of the nation with dunkathon triumphs that carried into the Final Four.

However, due to injuries and freakish bad luck — capped by unfair recruiting charges leveled by Knight, Digger Phelps and Bruce Pearl — the Illini lost seven NCAA games by three points or less. Some of these were hair-pullers, and Henson never quite got square with Dame Fortune.

Hall of Famer

Through the most difficult setbacks imaginable, Henson persevered … just as he did after the loss of son Lou Jr. in a traffic accident, and through multiple sicknesses that would have felled a less resilient person.

All four of his coaching assignments forced him to build from the ground up, and this was certainly true at Illinois. He quickly resuscitated a support group that had been disbanded, and started the Orange Krush (they’ll be 1,200 strong this season) with seven people in his living room.

He has done so many things that are unique to him, including a continuation of personal activities despite the mandatory routine of chemotherapy (for bone marrow problems) which goes for seven days with 21 days off … for the rest of his life.

Through it all, he plans to attend Illini football and basketball games, has accepted an invitation from Phillips to view the NU-Iowa game on the UI’s bye date (Oct. 17) and intends to travel to his November induction into the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in Kansas City.

A unique individual

The man is unique. Here are more examples:

• He turned the loss of his son into consoling others bearing similar tragedies, and he and Mary reached out to people they had never met.

• He was a hard, unrelenting taskmaster with his players, but he never swore. Not once.

• While most married couples tend to improve their living quarters as their income increases, Lou and Mary reside in the modest Champaign dwelling they bought in 1975. Most retired coaches live in places other than where they coached. Lou and Mary will be buried next to their son just east of Memorial Stadium.

• He was the first coach to integrate at Hardin-Simmons in 1962.

• He served as both coach and athletic director during his first term at New Mexico State.

• Coming out of a one-year retirement, he coached the 1997-98 season at New Mexico State for $1 per month. He took the Aggies to the NCAA tournament a year later, and coached until midway in the 2004-05 season when he was felled by non-Hodgkins lymphoma.

• He has a 25-mile highway from Las Cruces to El Paso named for him, as well as a street next to the State Farm Center.